Philosophy? WTF??

Fasten your berets and make sure the means of production have been secured because Venessa and Danny are talking Marx this week! Yes, hitherto Mike, Danny and Venessa have only interpreted the world of philosophy... the point is to change it! Dialectics also feature heavily this episode, especially the negative kind as we include a look at Adorno. Mike is still MIA but hopefully he's still doing his bit for UK and France relations in a Parisian Bar.

As the Philosophy World Tour recommences we find our hosts divided! Danny stumbles his way into Munich, meets up with an old friend to discuss who is the best German philosopher over a tall Oktoberfest beer stein, but where is Mike? How did they split up? All will be revealed as your favourite Philosophy podcast returns!Join Our Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/454227078353259/ Follow us on Twitter: @PhilosophyWtfContact us: [email protected] your favourite drinking and thinking podcast! Philosophy?WTF?? Stuff Available: https://www.teepublic.com/user/danmifune

It looks like Danny and Doctor Mike have had too much fine French Cuisine and have been knocking back too much wine. They'll be resting under some trees for a while to recover. Please join them for more French thinkers when they return!

This week join Danny and Mike as they get down and dirty with Diderot. Listen as they risk the wrath of the divine being as they delve into deism and the designed world - is that a watch I see on the beach or is god just pleased to see us? Be delighted and reassured as everything seems to make sense, has a plan and is where it should be - including Danny still speaking from a French public convenience! 

This week join us for Rousseau style selfies by the river and manipulate your image for the sake of social success and recognition. But what is the cost to our innocence as we abandon the state of nature for the hurly burly of social interaction? Yes, society, who will save us from its corrupting influence? Will it be the Social Contract? Can everyone really have a say in every decision that needs to be made? I mean, I can’t even decide what to have for breakfast. Are we only free one our voices are unmediated by representative authority? Will elected officials always let us down? Imagine if that were the case, right? Yes, the political merde really hits the fan as Rousseau sticks it to the man. All this and Danny gets the last word and admits to being a git. You’ll only know it for sure if you listen to the finish.

This week, join Mike and Danny as they discuss beards and public perception. Yes, we are still in France and Montaigne and the crew are living large. Extreme philosophy is the name of the game and the French philosophes take no prisoners - it's Bastille or exile for out fearless thinkers. Tolerance and freedom are front and centre but who do we tolerate? Do we tolerate the intolerant? Can we educate people to make appropriate choices or do we have to censor those that don’t agree with us? Voltaire certainly put his money on education and Rousseau put his trust in swinging through the trees and beating his chest. Yes, always something for everyone in French philosophy. All of this and self love - what more can you ask for in a podcast that only asks for a small investment of your time and the tacit commitment to a complex subscription payment scheme hidden cunningly in the small print - our fee is in the post. Question authority.

This week join Danny and Mike as they tuck in to a baguette packed with succulent slices proto-phenomenological goodness. Yes, it’s not even lunch time in France and we are already 2 bottles of merlot down and have started on the pastis. Listen in as we move between the front room (where we encounter the world) and the back room where we reflect on what we encounter in the front room - and where we can safely sit around in our pants and play on our XBoite. Yes, we are still in France and we are loving it. It’s time to say a big old “meh” to authority and, in a surprisingly un-French move, give a suspicious sidelong glance at passion. WTF Montaigne? Call yourself a French man?? All of this and we have still spectacularly failed to free Danny from the toilette - Non on ne regrette rien!

This week join Mike and Danny as they settle into cafe society and sip red wine on the banks of the Seine. Yes in France they philosophise on main street, he said ruefully. So, adjust your berets, order some moules-frite and get le garcon de cafe to leave the bottle as we introduce Michel Eyquem de Montaigne - essayist, sceptic, anecdotalist and all round renaissance thinker - but don't call him a philosopher for gods sake, he won't like it. Montaigne, the man who summed up philosophy in four words, "what do I know?". The man who advocated front room and back room thinking, the man who invented the essay and earned the enmity of all students for evermore. All this and a quick time hop back to Greece to meet with Pyrrho and his boys. Oh yes, and Danny is still trapped in the toilet, it's all very embarrassing really.

This week join Mike and Danny as they unlimber their accordions, put on their berets and pour themselves a large glass of Calvados. Yes, we have made it to France and you can feel the angst literally rolling out of every cafe, bar and literary salon along the banks of the Seine. This, my friends, is where the merde gets real and philosophy is found on the very street corners of life. Not for the French the comfortable abstraction of philosophical reflection sequestered within the dreaming spires of some university or captured within the pages of a carefully balanced text book. Oh no, if you want to do the philosophy then it’s down and dirty with every thought torn from your own screaming psyche and thrown into the existential mud outside of a seedy bar at 3am in the morning to wrestle with the whatever it may find there. In the words of Hemingway; "Those who do not last are always more beloved since no one has to see them in their long, dull, unrelenting, no-quarter-given-and-no-quarter-received, fights that they make to do something as they believe it should be done before they die. Those who die or quit early and easy and with every good reason are preferred because they are understandable and human. Failure and well-disguised cowardice are more human and more beloved.”. All this and Danny sounding like he’s locked in the toilet. Right, who wants a drink?Join Our Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/454227078353259/ Follow us on Twitter: @PhilosophyWtfContact us: [email protected] your favourite drinking and thinking podcast! Philosophy?WTF?? Stuff Available: https://www.teepublic.com/user/danmifune

This week, feel the clammy hand of dread upon your shoulders as we suggest the inconceivable notion of the Vitruvian Spider! (Yes, just picture that and try and sleep again!). Join Danny, Nesso and Dr Mike as we say farewell to the Italian Renaissance in all its wonder and glory - not because we don’t care for it but quite frankly we think we can make our own. War, pandemic, run away capitalism, political power vacuums and an upheaval in familiar working conditions, how difficult can it be? Take a seat, put your feet up and watch as the excited puppy of the Renaissance, running around with its Copernican chew-toy, gets smacked on the nose by the rolled up newspaper of burgeoning Enlightenment empiricism. Oh yes, nobody likes their paradigms shifted do they? No sir, but it’s too late now, Nietzsche's  madman is putting on his trainers and is getting read to run. Let’s give him some room guys.